Historical

My first Stephenson novel, and likely his second best after The Diamond Age

Even though it’s a completely different culture, I identified a lot of the depictions of the immigrant experience in the book.

Read while traveling in India. Depressing, but well-written.

Intense story of Shackelton’s 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica.

Fun, modern take on the backstory of characters from Greek Mythology

Read the Spanish translation because I was traveling and ran out of books

Portuguese translation

Silly fun

I embarked on this (silly) goal to read ten Spanish-language books in 2023, but stupidly picked this 555-page monster with plenty of challenging Castilian vocabulary as my first book. Unsurprisingly, my reading speed in Spanish is far slower than English, and I discovered how much of my love of books is due to reading quickly. I kept on pausing this book to read other quick (English language) reads, so it took me about a year and half to finish this. I enjoyed the book, though my Spanish isn’t quite at the level to fully appreciate the quality of the writing.

Not great, but not as bad as I thought it would be.

Not for me